"His Grace, the Duke of Ravensfield."
Catherine turned with everyone else to see this mysterious duke, this subject of so much speculation.
Her heart stopped.
James.
It was James descending the stairs, but transformed. Gone was the rain-soaked traveler. In his place stood a duke in full evening dress, magnificent despite the black armband of mourning, his coat fitted perfectly to those shoulders she knewso well. His dark hair was styled fashionably, his expression remote and aristocratic.
But those eyes, those storm-grey eyes that had looked at her with such hunger, such possession, they were the same.
Their gazes met across the ballroom.
She saw the moment he recognized her. His step faltered slightly, his eyes widening. For an instant, his careful mask slipped, and she saw shock, desire, and something else, flash across his face.
Then the Duke's expression smoothed back into aristocratic indifference, and he continued his descent as if he hadn't just seen the woman he'd bedded four nights ago standing in his ballroom.
"Lady Catherine?" Pemberton's voice seemed to come from very far away. "Are you well? You've gone quite pale."
"I..." Catherine couldn't form words. Her body was responding to seeing him; her thighs clenching with remembered pleasure, her breasts tightening beneath the silk, every place he'd touched her suddenly alive with memory.
James was the Duke of Ravensfield.
The man who'd taken her virginity, who'd made her beg and plead and shatter apart, who'd told her they could never meet again because of duty…he was the Duke of Ravensfield.
"Perhaps some air?" Pemberton suggested, concerned.
"Yes," Catherine managed. "Air would be... yes."
But as Pemberton led her toward the terrace doors, she could not stop herself from glancing back.
The Duke of Ravensfield was watching her, his grey eyes blazing with an intensity that stole the very breath from her lungs, her body aching with the memory of his touch and the dangerous promise of more.
Then, suddenly and ruthlessly, he looked away. His face shuttered, his shoulders rigid with cold resolve, as if she were no more than a stranger. He ignored her completely, a deliberate cruelty that cut as deeply as it protected him.
Not once for the remainder of the night did he look her way again.
And with that, Catherine understood that whether from punishment or self-preservation, the Duke of Ravensfield had chosen to erase her.
Chapter 6
Three months later.
"My dear Lady Catherine, you simply must stop looking like you're attending a funeral every time the Duke of Ravensfield enters a room. People will think you have indigestion."
Catherine nearly choked on her drink, the sweet almond liqueur burning her throat as she struggled not to cough. Lady Pemberton, her companion's mother and recent addition to her circle of tormentors, though the woman preferred the term "advisors," watched her with the satisfaction of a cat who'd successfully knocked over a vase.
"I haven't the faintest notion what you mean," Catherine managed, dabbing delicately at her lips with her handkerchief. The very same handkerchief she'd been carrying for three months, though she'd die before admitting why. "The Duke of Ravensfield is nothing to me beyond a fellow member of society."
"Indeed?" Lady Pemberton's tone suggested she'd rather believe in fairy folk dancing in her garden. "Then why, pray tell, did you suddenly develop a fascination with the wallpaper pattern when he arrived at the Worthington ball last week? those roses haven't been that interesting since they were painted."
"The light was giving me a headache," Catherine lied smoothly. She'd become quite accomplished at lying these past months. It was remarkable how practice improved one's skills.
"And at the Sefton dinner gathering?"
"I was admiring Lady Sefton's miniatures."
"Behind a potted bay?"
